The Formation of Mass Culture Part II: Modernism and the Middlebrow

1. The Formation of Mass CulturePart II: Modernism and the Middlebrow Making of the Modern World Week 19: Smyth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINDtlPXmmE “[A] culture must finally be interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production.” Raymond Williams “Everyday life is defined contradictions: illusion and truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of the sector man controls and the sector he does not control.” Henri Lefebvre

2. Industrialization, urbanization, immigration of 19thC fuel 20thC modernism Rejection of traditional Victorian culture Creation of new select canon Faith in individual work of art Fascination with race and culture: connection with appropriation of 19thC and searches for ‘national’ purity Similar historical context; use of technology Incorporation of familiar themes of Victorian culture Appeal to widest audience Mass-produced image (Walter Benjamin) Miriam Hansen’s term: “vernacular modernism” Modernism and Mass Culture

3. Cultural movement of first half 20thC avant-garde rejection of Victorianism ambivalent attraction to industry and technology form over content: racial implications? benefits from immigrant cultures Walter Benn Michaels: nativism, modernism Paul Strand, Pepper (1932) Modernism

4. Seven Lively Arts (1924) Praises new modern American arts of comic strip, jazz, cinema American arts do not imitate style, narratives, themes of European art Emphasizes virtuosity and kinetic energy of American arts Gilbert Seldes and the Lively Arts

5. The Liveliest Art

6. Black Responses to Birth of a Nation • Oscar Micheaux, Within Our Gates (1920) • Retells racial drama in story of white man’s rape of black woman • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1E0NrcnwAE

7. A Lively Art or transnational culture industry? • Silent films appeal across nations through 1928 • Chaplin’s popularity in Japan, Russia, US (working-class audiences) • Mary Pickford first woman studio ‘head’: UA (1920) • An evening’s cheap entertainment: anyone could afford a movie • Early emphasis on ‘exoticism’ of stars, expatriate communities in southern California • But Hollywood also markets ideal ‘white’ modern American woman (Gloria Swanson), working-class girl (Clara Bow) and average American guy (Gary Cooper) • Studios unite as major corporations in 1920s: production, distribution, exhibition controlled from the top down (Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., etc.) • Work closely with other industries to mass-market films: fashion, advertising, journalism, fiction • Diversification: all studios have news services and cartoons • Corporate, sales and production offices all over Europe • Ties to government agencies, Department of Defense, consular agencies • Films censored in US to avoid inciting foreign audiences to revolt

8. The Other Market Sergei Eisenstein’s different interpretation of content and form, 1925

9. Mixed messages

10. Film (beginning of worldwide Hollywood dominance after WWI; corporate consolidation of industry) Radio (a few mavericks start it; goes corporate in 1920s; ad sponsors) Tabloid Journalism (chain papers, syndicates and Hearst’s ‘yellow’ appeal to the masses Photojournalism (the rise of Time, Life and Fortune) Comics (Krazy Kat national art of America according to cultural critic Gilbert Seldes) Advertising (est. as corporate industry in 19th C but takes off in 1920s as corporations market to an increasingly consumer and image-driven society) All these major industries are concerned with mass production and marketing, constructing the idea of modernity, and often reinforcing mainstream white identities Modern Media, 1920-60 (a.k.a. the Culture Industries)

11. Hollywood dominance • Gilbert Seldes and Charlie Chaplin reject dichotomy between art and mass culture—call themselves “high lowbrows” • Often bifurcates along European/American lines • Critics like William Allen White call for authentic national popular culture; reject modernist canons– and also the rest of the world • Early attempts at workingclass/women’s/integrated culture shift: neo-liberal masculine dominance • Global dominance of Hollywood: appropriation of other national histories; media manipulation; cultural vampirism and cannibalisation of old films

12. The New Empire http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xjr2hnOHiM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYgiAmdFjEI

13. Masscult and Midcult • Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939): art versus consumerism • Dwight MacDonald (1960): • Masscult “an instrument of domination,” mechanistic, without standards, popular—not to be confused with “folk art” and working-class culture • Midcult will infect true High Culture, and its values “instead of being transitional —‘the price of progress’—may now themselves become a debased, permanent standard.”

14. Middlebrows • Joan Shelley Rubin (1992) notes that cultural study focuses on either high or low, but not the median culture Middlebrow writers in 1920s at odds with Lost Generation, high-art moderns • Longstanding contempt for middlebrows (women writers) by cultural conservative Dwight MacDonald • Middlebrow culture more powerful than either—heritage of Mathew Arnold (Culture and Anarchy, 1882) and persistence of Victorian values of cultural improvement • Book-of-the-Month Club, Saturday Review of Literature, Pulitzer Prize, Alexander Wolcott’s radio show, historical films, Clifton Fadiman’s “Great Literature,” BBC Radio 4 lists all 20th-century outcroppings of “middlebrow culture.” • Contemporary middlebrow tv (Slate): Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, The Wire

15. Spread of Masscult: Television • 1925 John L. Baird demonstrates his early model for television at Selfridge’s • Broadcast television programmes date from 1928 • 1934 Philo Farnsworth’s electrical television • First commercially manufactured TV set: Germany, 1934 • 1941: First televised ad aired in US during a baseball game • Television takes over after WWII and goes domestic. 0.5% of U.S. households have TV set in 1946, rises to 55.7% in 1954, and 90% in 1962. In Britain, 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 million in 1968. • Transcontinental broadcasts, 1951 • Broadcasting from 1950s combination of variety shows, Western serials and soap operas • Unlike individual films, tv often at mercy of group of producers, shareholders, and ratings • Film profits decline; Hollywood tries to initiate cultural hierarchy of own—tv new “low” • Playhouse 90, Edward R. Murrow programmes attempt to reach select cultural audiences • Entertainment blogs give viewers the illusion of textual participation and productive engagement

16. Is Mass Culture Dangerous? • Chicago exhibitors censor Jesse James films, 1908 and Jack Johnson fights, 1910 • Film’s Production Code Administration (1930, 1934) and other national censor boards threaten to ban films from theatres unless industry follows prevailing moral ‘codes.’ Pornography goes mainstream in 1970s when old censorship restrictions and ratings are obliterated • Literature from Hamlet to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Gone with the Wind banned by community educators beginning 1870s • 1939: Billie Holliday’s record company, Columbia, refused to release recording of Strange Fruit for fear of alienating mainstream racist audiences: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs • Radio and TV in US regulated since 1934 by Federal Communications Commission (UK’s equivalent of ITC). TV adopts Hollywood’s old Hays code. Sponsors support network programming and withdrawing support can be its own form of censorship • Censoring the internet difficult because of free speech claims, transnational flow of information and pseudo-anonymity

17. The ‘New’ Interconnected Media • Blockbusters (supported by product ads and multinational corporations) largely pre-sold content and audiences (adaptations of best sellers) • MTV (Music Television: video ‘narratives’ have ties to films; theme songs; iTunes) • Video games (b. 1958, with Tennis for Two; 1980 Pac-Man Arcade game;1989 Nintendo Gameboy; biggest markets Japan, UK, US); ties to major blockbusters like The Lord of the Rings trilogy

18. The Hollywood Blockbuster • b. 1975 with Spielberg’s Jaws • Aimed at global rather than national market; broad audiences, simple action stories • Violence integral to genre; often adaptation from best-selling novel or comic-strip • Now with theatre attendance down (US:, UK: Global), Hollywood has made most of its money in past decade through network contracts, foreign distribution rights and DVD sales • Even with censorship boards gone, trend has been toward children’s entertainment: between 1989-2003, the average gross of an R-rated film was 7 million (US); G-films make an average of 79 million (US) • Hollywood challenged in recent years by national cinemas with art market niches and China and India. However, Hollywood still has entrenched mechanisms to maintain its dominance: Bollywood sold 3.6 billion tickets and had total revenues (theater tickets, DVDs, television etc) of $1.3 billion, whereas Hollywood films sold 2.6 billion tickets and generated total revenues (all formats, DVDs, etc) of $51 billion.

20. Lucas/Spielberg and the Age of Blockbusters Left: Grauman’s Premiere of Star Wars (1977) and above, Alec Guinness as Obi-wan (mass culture hires high art) Above: Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

21. Classical theory sees women as victims of visual system—looked at, exploited But: films cater to women’s specular fantasies (male stars) Film industry’s links to women’s literature Melodrama lets women have it both ways Female stars: empowerment– women are made not born—de Beauvoir Women, Modernism, and Hollywood

22. Postmodernism (1945-) • Above: Marilyn and Madonna as Marilyn • Above and below left: Marilyn in 1953 and reproduced by Andy Warhol shortly after her death in 1962 in the first of his assembly-line silkscreens

23. Selling corporate culture: Ogilvy’s Hathaway shirt campaign Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955): modern man nothing but an empty suit Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957) Men in Grey Flannel Suits: Mass Culture and the Crisis of Masculine Identity

24. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) Fragility of modern identity and social status Consequences of post-war wealth Cold War cultures Part of a wider fascination with spies, surveillance and the survival of individual in webs of post-national power (James Bond franchise, 1953-) Return of our fascination with allegedly conservative post-war era (Mad Men, 2005-) “Weak Faces” and Flannel Suits

25. Reconciling Mass Culture? • High art (defined by Clement Greenberg) now overtaken by mass culture in academic study; rejection of elitism • Post-structuralist deconstructive criticism breaks down unified works of art, canons, and grand narratives (or the meta-narrative) • Middlebrow creed fractures along conflict between creating a great cultural canon and selling it—reconciling desire for both high and low • But in a postmodern age, are all cultural texts simply a function of the demands and controls of global capitalism? Your illusion of choice in a corporate supermarketplace of culture (Fredric Jameson) • Can popular culture challenge dominant stereotypes, ideologies, perceptions, imagined histories, or does it simply reflect the prevailing constructed taste?